Semantic Matchmaking of Web Resources with Local Closed-World Reasoning

Ontology languages like OWL allow for semantically rich annotation of resources (e.g., products advertised at on-line electronic marketplaces). The description logic (DL) formalism underlying OWL provides reasoning techniques that perform match-making on such annotations. This paper identifies peculiarities in the use of DL inferences for matchmaking that derive from OWL's open-world semantics, analyzes local closed-world reasoning for its applicability to matchmaking, and investigates the suitability of two nonmonotonic extensions to DL, autoepistemic DLs and DLs with circumscription, for local closed-world reasoning in the matchmaking context. An elaborate example of an electronic marketplace for PC product catalogs from the e-commerce domain demonstrates how these formalisms can be used to realize such scenarios.